The Chinese characters on the cover translate to “Education.” Copyright © 2014 by the National Center on Education and the Economy. All rights reserved. Chinese Lessons Shanghai’s Rise to the Top of the PISA League Tables Interviews with: Kai-ming Cheng Tom Corcoran Ben Jensen Vivien Stewart Minxuan Zhang Interviewed with an introduction by Marc Tucker ® A Program of the National Center on Education and the Economy® Table of Contents 1 Introduction by Marc Tucker 8 Vivien Stewart 13 Minxuan Zhang 23 Tom Corcoran 26 Kai-ming Cheng and Ben Jensen 31 Biographies 5 Marc Tucker Introduction In 1978, when Deng Xiao Ping took the helm in China, the schools there were in disastrous shape. Mao had closed them years earlier, during the Cultural Revolution, and sent the teachers out to the countryside to perform manual labor, to do penance for their bourgeois values. But, when the 2009 PISA results came out, Shanghai was at the top of the global education league tables. And, when the results for 2012 were released in December 2013, Shanghai still topped the charts, but its average performance had improved by more than four percentage points from the previous survey. How could this have happened? Many of us had earlier been struck by the Singapore achievement. Singapore had gone from having hardly any public education system at all when it first became fully independent in 1965 to the top of the charts in the 2000 PISA survey. But Singapore had a population of only 2.5 million when it began and around 5 million when it won the PISA sweepstakes in 2000. It was only 31 years from the time Deng Xiao Ping took over the leadership of China in 1978 to the year in which Shanghai first topped the PISA league tables. And Shanghai was not a small island of two and half million souls, later to be five. By 2013, Shanghai had a population of more than 23 million people. So, again, how could this have happened? I recently posed that question to five observers in telephone interviews. The people I talked with were: Kai-ming Cheng Cheng is Chair Professor of Education at Hong Kong University where he previously served as Senior Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor. A former member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and advisor to the World Bank, the Asia Society and many other institutions with major roles in education worldwide, Cheng played a central role in the recent education reforms in Hong Kong and serves as an advisor to both the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and the Chinese Ministry of Education. Tom Corcoran Corcoran is co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Over the years, Corcoran has 1 led a number of high profile research, evaluation, and professional development projects in the United States and abroad. A decade ago, Corcoran was working closely with the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission; that experience provided the opportunity to learn a lot about education in Shanghai before the more recent reforms were implemented. Ben Jensen Jensen spent five years as a highly regarded analyst in the OECD Education Directorate before returning to Australia to lead the education work of the Grattan Institute in Melbourne. Two years ago, he completed a comparative study of the education systems of a number of East Asian education systems that was very well received by the government in his country. Currently he is conducting a study of the Shanghai system for the continuous professional development of teachers that has also gotten a lot of attention. Vivien Stewart Stewart is semi-retired, and, in that capacity, Senior Advisor to the Asia Society for Education, where she was, until recently, the Vice President for Education. While at Asia Society, she was often in China, meeting with education officials at every level and visiting Chinese schools. Prior to joining Asia Society, Stewart directed the children, youth and education programs at Carnegie Corporation of New York. Though she professes to be retired, Stewart is in great demand all over the world at gatherings at which comparative national education performance is the key topic. Minxuan Zhang Zhang is President of the Shanghai Normal University; Director of the Center for International Education Study and Consultation in the Chinese Ministry of Education and a scholar in the field of comparative education. He has served as the Director-General of the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences. From 2004 through 2011, Zhang was the Vice-Director General of the Shanghai Municipal Education Committee, and, in that capacity, in charge of planning many of the education reforms for which Shanghai has since become famous. Three of these people—Kai-ming Cheng, Vivien Stewart and Minxuan Zhang— serve as members of the International Advisory Board of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, a program of the National Center on Education and the Economy. What is striking about these interviews is the way they complement each other. Each of the interviewees sees Shanghai through a different lens. One gets a complete picture only by combining these different views. Minxuan Zhang makes the key point that some of what Shanghai has accomplished is a function of characteristics of China and Shanghai that have been in place for a very long time and others are the result of specific policies enacted by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission over the last three decades. He terms these the three “Traditions” and the six “Moderns.” It is only by combining these two 2 influences that you can begin to understand what happened. He gives the reader an insider’s view, indeed, a designer’s view. And you can see how the pieces fit together in his mind, into one highly coherent whole. Vivien Stewart’s account of the chief characteristics of the Shanghai approach tracks Minxuan Zhang’s very closely, though she brings a very different angle of vision to the task. This is not surprising, because Stewart has been visiting China regularly for two decades and has been a frequent observer of the Shanghai education system for more than a decade. Because she has seen a lot of China outside Shanghai, she is able to parse out what is common to Chinese education as a whole and what is unique to Shanghai. Tom Corcoran was immersed in the Shanghai education development effort early on, mostly before the most recent policies were formulated and implemented. He left the scene just as Stewart began her visits to Shanghai. Because he spent a lot of time in Shanghai schools, Corcoran is able to give us a first-hand, detailed and nuanced view of what instruction looks like in Shanghai schools, and the ways in which the organization of Shanghai schools and the posture of the system toward teachers has contributed to professional teaching practice in that city. Both Stewart and Corcoran point to Shanghai’s approach to the continuing professional development of teachers, its unyielding focus on instruction, its interest in learning from others and its system for improving the performance of low-performing schools as areas in which other countries have a lot to learn from Shanghai. Kai-ming Cheng and Ben Jensen would, I think, agree with that, but both caution the reader not to do what analysts so often do: focus on a few key facets of the system in a search for magic bullets, ignoring the fact that the success of these particular factors is made possible only by the myriad other features of the system that gives it its particular gestalt. We cannot, they say, really understand how the Shanghainese built such an effective education system unless we understand it as a system that is more than the sum of its parts. People educated in the analytical methods of the sciences typically analyze everything, decomposing systems into their constituent parts and try to estimate the contribution of each to the effect on student achievement. By all means, do that, say Cheng and Jensen, but, unless you grasp holistically the way the whole comes together, unless you grasp the motivating spirit of the system, you do not really understand anything very important. That said, Jensen points out that Shanghai’s unique system for the professional development of serving teachers relies not on workshops done by outsiders, although there are plenty of those, but rather on the way teachers’ work is structured and the resulting incentives and support Shanghai teachers have for the continuous disciplined improvement of their teaching practice. Cheng attributes no small part of Shanghai’s success to its unrelenting focus on learning, not learning as measured 3 by one or another particular test—though he, like Zhang, sees Shanghai’s embrace of PISA as a major factor in its success—but learning as measured by the degree to which students are actually learning what the designers of the system had in mind for them to learn, always more than what any particular test can measure. I will not summarize the interviews here. They do not need a summary. But there are several points I’d like to make about what we might learn from Shanghai. The first has to do with certain elements in Chinese culture that contributed to the foundation on which the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission built its policies. It is incontestable that the high value the Chinese place on education has been a powerful asset to modern China in building a first-class education system. Parents and their values and attitudes matter. What they communicate to their children about the importance of paying attention in school, doing what is asked of them by their teachers and achieving at the highest possible level are very important determinants of high achievement.
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